


New Look

by SamQuixote



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Bodyswap, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-20 12:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2428250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamQuixote/pseuds/SamQuixote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Computers.  Why did it have to be computers.  In which Thomas and Harry swap bodies, and no one is quite sure who got the shorter end of the stick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spiders

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! First fic here, please enjoy. I have always loved bodyswap and various transformation/body-based notions (possessions, age up/down, genderswap, etc) even before I knew that fanfiction existed. Since then, I have found very little decent fic of this nature, especially for the Dresden Files. This makes me cry, and my tears are made of the writing-hand-sweat of genre authors from across the globe. It took me a while, but I have finally decided to lay my reservations aside and wade into the land of fanfiction authorship with guns blazing, hacking and slashing, slashing and burning, taking no prisoners. Brace yourselves, kids. I've got a lot of pent up fic to vent.

“This is so freaking stupid.”  
There was a muffled thump, and then something fell out of the sky and hit me on the head. It hurt. It was also covered in legs, which were touching my face.  
I kind of freaked, because I thought it was a giant spider. I flung it away from me heroically, with no screaming whatsoever, and gave it a good kick. I got a good look at it then, when it was lying dead on the floor. It didn’t have legs, it had wires, or possibly cables, sticking out from it at all angles. It looked fiddly and electronic, and not at all like a giant face-eating spider. Just then my brother’s head appeared from the trap door in the ceiling.  
“You know, Harry, if you don’t shut up and let me work then I am going to have to kick your ass. For real.”  
I snorted, picked up the whatever it was, and tossed it back up at him. He caught it in one hand with his super vampire reflexes. Jerk.  
“You’re a jerk,” I said.  
“And you are still messing things up, even from way the hell down there. Go stand in the doorway till I get this thing to turn on.”  
I grumbled, but went to stand in the doorway like he said. I mean, it’s not my fault that any tech more complicated than an eggbeater tends to malfunction around human wizards. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride, step down and let someone else handle things, no matter how annoying it is. I leaned against the door, my head brushing the top of the frame, and fished around in my pocket. At least I’d brought a snickers bar.  
It happens a lot less these days, but every once in a while I get a call to check out something weird, and it ends up being completely explainable vanilla stuff. Weird, creepy, totally messed up vanilla stuff, but vanilla all the same. I usually either sort it out myself or call some of my badass cop friends to take over, but tonight I had my brother and his hilariously oversized vehicle for backup, and also for a ride. The Blue Beetle was impounded. There was this ghost skateboard guy zipping around downtown, and…I was really busy, ok? Point being, Thomas was there with me when I went to check out the reported flashing lights and crazy noises coming from an abandoned farmhouse, and when it turned out to be just a whole mess of mysterious electronic stuff, he took it upon himself to figure out what it was. I was posted downstairs in order to make things not blow up. You know. Like a professional.  
There wasn’t much to see downstairs – a couple of benches and card tables, some filing cabinets up against the walls. I started snooping around and found a whole lot of incredibly confusing stuff – there were charts and empty boxes with labels that were mostly consonants and numbers, notebooks full of math (don’t ask me what kind, I don’t do that numerology crap), old newspapers, empty Chinese takeout boxes, and lots and lots of empty beer cans. I kicked one across the floor, frustrated. This was all junk. The good stuff was upstairs. It really galled me to get called out on a case that I couldn’t even be on the same floor as, let alone properly examine. Makes a guy feel kinda useless. I went and stood under the trapdoor again, staring up into the dim space.  
‘Hey, are you finding anything up there? Anything marked, ‘Evil Manifesto,’ or “My Secret Nefarious Plan”? Or should I just let you keep going, and then I can go home and come pick you up in the morning?”  
“Shut up.”  
“I could bring doughnuts…”  
“Dammit, wait…”  
There was a zapping sound, and the patch of ceiling I could see through the trapdoor got a hell of a lot brighter.  
“I got it! I got it to turn on!”  
I waved my arms in the air, almost as if I just didn’t care.  
“Great, good for you! Now what does it do?”  
There was a moment of silence, broken only by fizzy electronic noises.  
“I have no idea.”  
I groaned and kicked another empty can. I could have been home in bed right now. I could have been sitting by my fireplace, drinking hot tea and finishing my paperback, I could have finally discovered the secrets of Secret Moon X-19. I could have been asleep.  
“Thomas, I know you’re having a lot of fun up there playing mad scientist, but neither of us is really qualified for this sort of thing, and obviously whatever’s going on isn’t coming from our side of the street, so I say we just shut it down, call the real police, and…”  
“Wait, I can figure this out!”  
“No you can’t!”  
“I happen to be very good with computers, dickwad.”  
“Since when?”  
“Since forever. Now shut up and go back to the doorway, there’s no telling how all this will react to you now that it’s awake.”  
“Can this be the part where I go home and sleep and then come back in the morning to witness your crushing defeat?”  
I never got an answer to that one, because at that moment Thomas darkened the trap-doorway, hefting something in his hand. He threw it down at me, it conked me in the head, and everything went white.


	2. Obligatory Revelation Sequence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory.

The next thing that happened was that I fell down. I wasn’t too surprised by the falling in and of itself. It was more the fact that it was less of a some-jackass-just-dropped-something-on-my-head-and-I-collapsed kind of falling, and more of an I-just-stepped-off-a-roof kind of falling. I had very little time to think about how weird that was, however, because something large and uncomfortable broke my fall. It yelled a lot, and tried to hit me.  
“Shit! Shit!” I flailed a bit, struck out at something, and the hitting stopped. I gasped and rolled onto my side, fighting the urge to throw up. Whatever had just happened had really rung my bells. Everything was sort of swimming around, and hurting, and my voice sounded weird. In fact, everything sounded weird, and loud, and very very sharp. Some tiny, super-put-together part of my brain rallied enough to wonder what the hell had just happened, but the rest of me was very busy being confused and in pain, and ignored it. I coughed a few times, and then tried to stand up. I missed, and fell on my ass.  
Now, I’m not a gymnast or a ninja or anything, but most of the time I’m pretty good at basic things like standing up and sitting down. There have been times when this has not been the case, but there was usually a damn good reason for it. I’d been shaken up, I was still a little dizzy, but not THAT dizzy. I sat still, not moving from my sprawled position on the floor, and tried to focus. Everything felt off, like someone had broken into my apartment and rearranged all the furniture, except with my whole body. My limbs felt scrambled, and I was getting all the wrong signals from all the wrong everything. I took a deep breath and held one hand up in front of my face. And then I almost fainted.  
It wasn’t my hand. It was pale, and manicured, and looked like one of those hands that models gazillion-dollar watches in GQ. There was no shield bracelet on it. No familiar scars. My stomach did about two hundred backflips in two seconds, and I frantically felt my face, my hair, my clothes, but ended up poking myself in the eye and sticking a finger up my nose instead. Hell’s bells, this could NOT be what I was starting to think it was…  
It took me a minute, and a lot of deep breathing and anti-panic jedi techniques, but I managed to not throw up, and also to not freak out and run into a wall. Go me. I sat up, moving at a glacial pace, and took a moment to make sure that nothing else horrible was about to happen. It would really be just my luck for something to choose to attack right now. Or maybe someone would start up another apocalypse. There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, however, and I realized that I was stalling. I took a few deep breaths, and then I turned to the huddled mass that had broken my fall. It was wearing my damn coat, lying face down, out cold but still breathing. I managed to scuttle over to it and, hardly daring to breathe, rolled it over with one foot. The light from the trapdoor fell on a sharp-featured face, freshly shaved, terrifyingly familiar. Although, to be fair, it looked a lot different than it did when I normally saw it – I had never, in fact, seen what I looked like when knocked unconscious. Apparently I hadn’t been missing out on much. I knelt by my own body, and there was a moment where I thought I was about to throw up all over it. It's a good thing I managed to pitch to the side and hurl all over some old newspapers instead. That would have been so many levels of gross.

“Oh fuck.”


	3. Complicated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry theorizes. Thomas wakes up.

I have been through a lot of weird stuff. Like, a lot. Sometimes even I have trouble believing that utter weirdness that is my life. But nothing, nothing at all had prepared me for the experience of trudging through fallow farmland in the small hours of the morning, wearing my asshole brother’s creepy vampire skin, swimming in my now overlarge duster, and carrying my own body which, by the way, felt like it weighed about as much as a puppy. Which was just wrong. But light does not mean easy to carry, and it was pretty slow going as I struggled to keep myself…to keep Thomas…from flopping all over the place and smacking his (my) head against a fence post or something. That was okay by me. I needed something to concentrate on that was simple and straightforward, unlike, say, the question of what I was going to do when Thomas woke up. Assuming he did. Assuming it was Thomas in there. Assuming that no other horrible unexplainable thing happened first. Clearly, we’d been whammied by something, but barring the specialized actions of a certain evil necromancer, I’d never seen or heard of anything like this happening in real life. In any case, whatever had done this, it had been hellishly subtle and skilled enough to not only pull it off, but to leave no evidence, no trace of magic behind. Or, my brain offered, maybe it wasn’t magic at all. I mean, not all the crazy stuff in the world had to be magic, right? Maybe it was aliens, or the government. Honestly, the prospect of finding out it was a non-supernatural problem scared me more than the alternative – I didn’t really know how I would deal with it. Plus the whole thing just didn't make sense - there seemed to be no good reason for this to have happened to us. It was like the setup for some crappy movie. Unless it was some sort of nefarious plan to make us attack each other, or to confuse us, or to put us out of action somehow, in which case there would have been a million easier and more effective ways to accomplish that…  
I gritted my teeth and hiked my own huge body up on my shoulder. I was going crazy chasing my own tail, and I just couldn’t afford to think about those things right now. I had to focus on getting Thomas back to the car, getting somewhere safe, and then maybe we could both figure something out. Until then…  
Thomas shifted on my shoulder, and groaned quietly. Crap. I looked around – we were in the middle of a dry field, a million miles from anywhere, and at least half a mile away from the hummer where we had left it by the side of the road.   
“Oh, come on,” I muttered, and carefully lowered my brother to the ground, laying him out flat as gently as I could. He still looked like me. Oh god. I turned away for a minute and closed my eyes until the vertigo passed, although the profound creepiness decided to stick around. I turned back and leaned over him, trying not to look threatening.   
“Hey, Thomas? Thomas, you’re okay, you’re safe, just don’t freak out, ok man…”  
He stirred, and frowned, and then cracked his eyes open. I smiled and waved.  
“Ok, so this is a little complicated…”  
He lunged up at me and grabbed me by the windpipe, snarling. I said, “trhghk,”then grabbed at his hand, and swatted it off like a cobweb. Whoa. His eyes got wide at that, and I held up my hands, coughing a bit.   
“Thomas, look, it’s me…”  
He sprang to his feet and made to sprint across the field, but got about two steps before he tripped over my advantageously long legs and sprawled face first the grass.   
“…Harry” I finished, wincing. And maybe trying not to laugh a little bit. But mostly very concerned and wince-y. There was some muffled yelping, and then Thomas was facing me again across the dark grasses, crouched and glaring. Holy crap. I had no idea that I looked that intimidating when I glared. I mean, I know that people usually back off, even when they’re scary powerful immortal people who could easily snap me in half, but…damn.  
Thomas watched me for another moment, during which I was profoundly grateful that we had already soulgazed, and then cold, horrified panic began to seep across his face. It wasn’t a good look on me. He rose to his feet very slowly, and I saw him starting to freak out even more as he realized how high up off the ground he was. I stood quietly and watched as he fought the panic down, checked out his arms and clothes, and noted the pentacle hanging around his neck. My necklace, although he wore its twin. Then he looked up at me again, his eyes narrowing. I held up my hands and tried to not to look like an evil clone.  
“Hey, Thomas? You all right in there?”  
“Harry?” he said thickly, his eyes swimming out of focus.  
I gave him a cheery thumbs up. He scowled, then closed his eyes and threw up in the grass. Hell's Bells, I hate it when this much barfing goes on in one night.  
After a while he looked up at me, bleary-eyed, with a thread of spit hanging down from the corner of his mouth. On any other day I would have gloated endlessly about my brother looking that uncool, but since it was my face he was doing it with, it seemed much less satisfying. He spat into the weeds and pointed at me with a shaking hand.  
“Harry, assuming you are Harry, I just got a good taste of whatever disgusting shit you had for dinner, and that is not okay. I would like you to explain this now, and also to make it stop.”


	4. Ramifications

“So, do you think it’s like freaky Friday?”  
I waited for a reply, but Thomas was silent, staring out across the dark freeway. He was sitting hunched over in the driver’s seat, looking miserable and not talking. That was actually worrying me more than our…current situation. Freaky stuff was freaky stuff, I was used to that, but helping Thomas through whatever was going on in his head was a different matter. It had been a good half hour of tests and interrogations before he had decided to believe that I was me, and although he seemed to have accepted what had happened to us, it didn’t make him any less tense. It was my current mission to snap him out of it. Plus I was uncomfortable and scared as hell, and generally when that happens, I can’t shut myself up if my life depends on it.  
“Cause I was thinking, like, what if we have to act like each other, and pretend that nothing is wrong in order to learn some kind of lesson about how hard the other guy’s life is? I honestly don’t know which one of us got the shorter end of the stick.”  
I scratched a hand through my new curly hair. It was full of some kind of gel or putty or whatever Thomas used, and it left a residue on my fingers. Gross.   
“For starters, you’ll never be able to do my witty one-liners. No offense, Thomas, but its just not your strong suit…”  
“We’re not doing Freaky Friday.”  
“It speaks!” I threw up my hands in celebration. God, they were short. Augh.  
“I’m not joking, Harry,” he continued, gripping the steering wheel harder and not taking his eyes off the road. “This is bad, really really bad, and you aren’t taking it seriously...”  
“No, actually I’m trying desperately to cope through humor and stupid banter. You’re the one who’s too quiet.”  
"Have you thought this through? I mean, we didn’t just switch bodies,” he sighed, “God, I can’t believe I just said that. We didn’t just switch bodies, we switched EVERYTHING.”  
I nodded slowly. “Yes, I did notice that…”  
He huffed, and then turned to look at me for a moment.   
“Harry, how much magic can you do right now?”  
My blood ran cold. I stared at him in horror, then reached for my power, my will, my magic.   
There was nothing. A few sparks and embers, maybe, but other than that, nothing. In fact, there was a whole bunch of nothing, a deep, black, starving pit of nothing, and as I noticed it, it stirred, and opened, and IT noticed ME.   
Hell’s Bells.  
I had The Hunger.  
I immediately started hyperventilating as large, lizard-like portions of my brain reared their heads and started roaring, answering the call of the Hunger as it scorched through me, demanding that I hunt, feed, find something soft and tender and sweet and ravage the life out of it. I wanted to find a woman and squeeze the energy out of her like a juicebox, then crumple her up, toss her in the trash, and start hunting for more. It was deafening, overwhelming, and for a moment I was about to give in. A very long moment. Thankfully all those years of wizard training came to my aid, and I froze, breathed, fought to get it under control while it gouged my mind and stoked my instincts. I’ve had a lot of practice shutting things out of my mind, and while this was a hell of a lot more proactive than anything I’d dealt with before, I eventually got it locked away, and my breathing returned to normal. Thomas had pulled the car over, and we were idling on the side of the road. He was watching me.  
“You’re right. This is bad.”  
“Told you.”  
I took a shuddering breath, and leaned my forehead down on the glove compartment.   
“So I’m guessing you have…”  
“Your magic? Yeah. I don’t know how to use it, but it’s there, and I could probably manage some simple spells, although I might accidentally blow up the entire state. I just got the raw potential, not the skill or the ability to handle it, so I’m going to leave it be for now.” He peered at me, his face hard to read. “How are you holding up?”  
“It’s…I can deal with it. I can get it under control. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with something crazy invading my head.” The Hunger paced behind the mental bars I had set up around it, but I had it blocked out for now. Tomorrow might be a different story. Thomas pulled back onto the road and started towards home.  
“You might think that now, but I fed just before we came here, and it’s just going to get worse. By tomorrow, you’re going to have a big problem.”  
I didn’t want to say it, but I knew I had to. And not just to steer the conversation away from myself. I leaned back and looked out the window.  
“And you won’t. Have a problem, I mean. Not this one.”  
He didn’t say anything. I forged ahead.  
“Must be nice, to be free of it. Big trade off for the super strength and all that, but you get to be human for the time being. Sort of changes things, I guess.”  
Still nothing. Time to pull out the big guns.  
“Are you going to call Justine?”  
The silence stretched out as Thomas blinked rapidly a few times. I didn’t say anything. Maybe I’d overstepped myself.  
“We aren’t going to talk about that, Harry.”  
“Oh. Right, okay.”  
“It would take too much explaining. And even if…” he shook his head, as if trying to get rid of a thought. I decided to throw him a line.  
“Yeah. No, you’re right. We focus on getting this fixed, and keeping things simple. Can’t afford to get distracted.”  
He nodded, and seemed satisfied. Best to let him deal with that on his own. Although I would have to think of a tactful way to tell him that he was completely and totally not allowed to have sex with anyone until we got this sorted out. Because, seriously, eww.  
“So, how are we going to play this?”  
Thomas frowned, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.  
“Well, I guess a good place to start would be tracking down the call that led us there – we should probably get someone to help us check out that lab equipment, and then…”  
I rolled my eyes. “Well, yeah, all that, but that’s not what I meant.”  
“Come again?”  
“Look, we don’t know how long this is going to last – we’re both kind of high-profile guys, and knowing our luck some sort of crazy disaster is going to strike the minute we’re inside Chicago city limits. Plus, every single time this has ever happened in a movie, the idea is that the two people have to pretend to be each other in order for the spell to lift, so do you think…”  
“Nope. Not a chance. I told you, we’re not doing Freaky Friday. Friends and allies get the truth, everyone else, we just don’t say anything. Nothing bad is going to happen when we get back, so will you please just do the damn joke and get it over with?”  
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What joke?”  
“The one where you say it isn’t Friday, it’s Tuesday. You know you want to, and it’s going to be annoying as hell whether you do it now or later, so just do it now and get it over with.”  
Oh, that joke. I pursed my lips and stared out the window for a minute, then shrugged.  
“Nah, I’m good.”  
“Seriously?”  
“Yeah. Not really my style. Good idea though.”  
“You are an ass.”  
He reached into the cupholder and pulled out some sort of mp3 player about the size of a stick of gum. Seriously, how do people even use those things? He clicked it on with his thumbnail, then swerved wildly as the thing sparked and popped in his hand. Thomas dropped it and locked both hands back on the wheel, his face white.  
“Shit, was that…”  
“Yeah, I think so.”  
“Christ, Harry…”  
“What? For once, for once in my life, it wasn’t me!”  
He sighed.  
“You’re right. I guess…augh this is so stupid.”  
We were silent for a bit, then Thomas reached into his pocket and handed me his cell phone.  
“Probably best if you hang onto this.”  
“Cool. I always wanted one of these.”  
“Well, now you’ve got one. So, where are we going?”   
“My place. Before anything else, we need to get somewhere safe, and we need to talk to Bob. Also, I think if I don’t get somewhere familiar and normal, I might start freaking out again.”  
“Good plan.”  
I turned the phone on, and started poking around. It was the first time anyone had ever let me use a touch screen, or a cell phone for that matter, and it was several degrees beyond cool. Very science fiction-y. I settled back for the ride home, thinking that even though my life had once more taken a nosedive for the weird, at least it came with some neat gadgets.


	5. Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey kids - thanks for reading and kudosing and commenting, and generally sticking around! I am really enjoying this so far, and I hope you are as well. I've got some fun stuff planned for the next few chapters, so stay tuned, eat your vegetables, and support your local library!

“Harry, you need to put that down.”

“Just a sec, there’s just one more of those stupid pigs and then I’ll be done, I promise...”

“No, Harry, you need to put the phone away. We’re here.”

I looked up and found that Thomas was right – we had made it back to my boarding house completely without incident. That seemed a minor miracle in and of itself. I turned off the phone, although it was harder than I’d expected to put the thing down, and sat for a moment in the dark, silent car. Thomas sat in the drivers seat, a dark, long-boned figure that looked nothing like my brother. 

“Well,” he said, after a mimute, “are we going to go inside?”

I took a breath. “I just realized I can’t open the door.”

“What?” 

“The wards. I can’t take the wards down.”

Thomas nodded, then pulled the keys out of the hummer and held them up in front of my face. The charm I had made for him, the one that let him go through my wards without causing an explosion, winked on the keychain, next to a plastic figurine of a ninja. I reached out and took the keys, and, on reflex, reached out with my wizard’s senses, trying to probe at the little bit of spellwork, wondering if it would work for two. Except of course that I didn’t have wizard senses anymore. There was nothing to reach out with. I was blind. I tossed the keys a few times in my hands, to hide the trembling.

“Cool. So I guess that’s figured out.”

Thomas opened his door. “Come on, let’s get inside. I need a sandwich. Or you need a sandwich. Whatever. Sandwiches are needed.”

I am not going to claim that I emerged from the Starship Hummer with effortless grace, but anyone who says that I misjudged the distance to the sidewalk and ended up sprawled on the ground with my duster tangled around my stupid short legs would be lying. Terrible, terrible lies.

Thomas came round the back of the car and helped me up, towering over me in a completely unacceptable way.

“It looks weird with you in the coat, you know.”

“Well, if you don’t want to do Freaky Friday and pretend to be me, then you don’t get to wear the coat. Them’s the rules.”

We made it into the house all right – passing through my own wards without proper magical senses was a bit weird, like going through an invisible bead curtain, but once I was inside, all the familiar sights and smells of my apartment came to greet me, and I felt like some small measure of normality had been restored. There was a mrowling sound and Mister, my giant tomcat, appeared from the shadows and collided with my legs, sending me back a step. My legs. He knew it was me. I might have teared up a little as I crouched down to rub his ears and give him the attention he had earned.

“Hey there furball, good to see you too...”

“Harry what happened to your damn matches?”

“What?” I looked up to see Thomas, a dim outline in the darkness, feeling along the top of the mantelpiece and banging my shins on things. 

“Matches, Harry. Where do you keep them?”

Oh. Right. I tried to remember where I kept the matches, and then it came to me.

“Don’t have any. Ran out, maybe a month ago.”

Thomas swore, then put his hands on his hips.

“Seriously? You have no electricity.”

I shrugged and wiggled my fingers at him. “Wizard.”

Thomas snorted. “Well, not anymore. Try the right hand pocket of my jacket.”

I did so, encountering minimal trouble with the hyper-trendy micro-zipper, or whatever, and found a carton of cigarettes and a plastic bic lighter. 

“Well hey. Flickum freakin’ bicus." I clicked the lighter on and set to work on the candles. Thomas grabbed one and headed into the kitchen. As the light grew, I began to feel more and more like things were going to be okay. We were in no immediate danger as far as I could tell, we had a solid lead on this mystery, and I had the Hunger under control for the time being. On top of that, my cat knew who I was, there were going to be sandwiches, and I was home in my cozy little apartment. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was forced to light my candles with a plastic lighter, and that I had a ravenous perverted demon locked up in my head. Almost. I thought of my used paperback copy of Secret Moon X-19, left on my bedside table with a bookmark shoved in twenty pages before the end, right at the good part where the cyborg people are holding the Prince of the Lunarites hostage, and some other bad guys are about to blow up the whole galaxy. I realized that I might even get to finish it tonight, before bed. Stranger things have happened.

“Hey, Thomas, since when did you smoke?”

He poked his head in from the kitchen, where bacon smells were beginning to happen.

“Since I got bored and bought some the other day. Don’t you start lecturing me about it, it’s not like I can get cancer from it or anything.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get these back until I’m taller than you again.” I turned to the fireplace, then thought that this might be a good time to tell him about the no sex rule. Since I was on a roll and all.

“Thomas, on that note...”

I didn’t get to finish, though, because at that point there were three knocks at my front door. Thomas appeared from the kitchen again.

“Harry, please tell me you ordered a pizza.”

“No, and I wasn’t expecting any visitors either.”

We both just stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. There was more knocking, urgent, maybe desperate, maybe angry. I went and grabbed my revolver out of its drawer, checked to make sure it was loaded, then pressed it into Thomas’ hands.

“Look,” I said, “I’ll answer it, you be my backup. If anyone’s coming here, they’re coming here for me.”

“But you’re not you,” Thomas pointed out, hefting the gun uncertainly.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that, and I do know what someone might want from me so I can answer as you on my behalf better than you could pretend to be me to someone else.”

Thomas shrugged, spinning the gun in his hand. I was pretty sure that when I did that it made me look like a gangly wannabe cowboy, but Thomas made it look coolly dangerous. “That made no sense, but sure. Knock yourself out.”

I approached the door, feeling more than a little nervous. I was desperately hoping that nothing evil or violent was lurking behind Door Number One – Thomas and I were in no shape for a brawl. At least I’d gotten my brother out of potential harm’s way without pointing out that between the two of us, I was the hard-to-kill vampire now, and he was just some guy who wasn’t even a wizard. He was vulnerable, more so than I had ever been, and I had the sense he wouldn’t want to talk about it. So instead I walked up to the door, which now had the ward-charm looped around the handle, and wrenched it open just as the knocking started again.

Karrin Murphy stood on my doorstep, her fist raised, her mouth grim. She had helmet hair, and a backpack slung over one shoulder. When she looked up at me, into my eyes, she held the gaze and didn’t look away. 

“Thomas, good, you’re here. Where’s Harry? I really need to talk to him.”

I swallowed, and every ounce of weirdness and uneasiness that had been banished by being home came flooding back to me. I looked into Murphy’s eyes, really looked into them, for the first time ever. No soulgaze started. I kept looking, ignoring the voice of the Hunger as it sniffed and snarled and noticed entirely inappropriate things about Murphy. Inappropriate, but not untrue. Behind me, I heard Thomas yelp and rush back to the kitchen, where the bacon was burning. Murphy was watching me now, concerned.

“Oh, there he is. Thomas, are you alright?”

Well, apparently this was how this was going to happen. I broke the gaze and stepped back, inviting her into the apartment. 

“I’m...come inside. You’re gonna want to sit down for this one.”

It could have worked out fine. Murphy would have come inside, Thomas would have made BLTs, and he and I could have explained the situation, taken the time to tell the whole story and get her adjusted to everything. Yeah. That would have been nice. Instead, as I moved aside to invite Murphy in, I saw a flash of metal over her shoulder, and two glowing red eyes in the darkness. They were about nine feet off the ground. I barely managed to grab Murphy by the front of her shirt and pull her aside before a blue-white beam of fire roared out of the shadows and blasted a sizzling hole in my carpet.


End file.
